I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always been a fan of the project.
It makes sense to increased research funding now that they have a long list of newly discovered planets to target, but what other scientific endeavors do they retire to open up any meaningful government funding?
With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.
Ok so I’m calling bluff on the trillion dollar deficits hyperbole. This is a cudgel argument used without any deep exposition against $subjectiveBadIdea.
We live in a financial world where banks magic up funds all the time and nobody bats an eye, but governments can’t do it for projects?
Further, imagine trying to calculate the added GDP for all of a nations infrastructure over the years its existed and been in use for free or near free. Yes, there are taxes levied in fuel transactions, but clearly that’s not the entire value added.
Edit-Deficit hawks are really arguing against deficits in the secret search for forcing the economy to be zero-sum and punitive. Governments job is to create and reinforce property rights, amongst other things. They do that by creating a resource allocation system - thankfully capitalistic for the most part. Capitalism only exists at this scale with currency - that only the government authenticates. Etc etc. The governments debt is a reflection and indicator of the value its left in the market. Back to nap time.
Has the discovery of these 17 primes been useful in any way for further mathematics analysis? Are there any hypotheses or theorems about Mersenne primes that have used the facts about these 17 particular numbers in any way?
There’s something fascinating about the previous comment. A knee-jerk rejection of the scale. I immediately suspected that commenter hails from somewhere in Europe. The scale is way different here, and in online communities that is often lost as people talk past each other. I think when solving problems there is benefit in thinking about what happens at several different scales.
It was certainly a knee-jerk reaction and totally my fault. I see the concepts of debt and deficit so frequently mixed that it's already in my muscle memory.
Your knee-jerk reaction was half right, by the way: I'm somewhere in Europe where billions and trillions have different meaning.
It makes sense to increased research funding now that they have a long list of newly discovered planets to target, but what other scientific endeavors do they retire to open up any meaningful government funding?
With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.